joenforcer @ joenforcer @midwest.social

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2 yr. ago

The true reality from someone who works in this space is that every company with an intelligent marketing department uses an email service specialized to help market to a customer file filled with email addresses with preferences tailored to each customer, and marketing campaigns are designed days or weeks in advance and scheduled to go out on a rolling basis. Email addresses that get queued up for some sort of email campaign are already "locked and loaded" to some degree and are not designed to be unraveled to remove one random unsubscribe request. Since the email providers receive client updates perhaps once a day to fill campaign lists, your unsubscribe as a rule will not immediately sync to be removed from any future campaigns you're not already signed up to receive. On top of that, syncs can and do fail, however infrequently. This means that if there is a technical issue with the connection of some sort, it can take a day or two to resolve. A heavy marketer may still send a couple emails to a customer that unsubscribed while that sync issue is being repaired.

tl;dr: Most companies remove you from email campaigns within a day. 7-10 days is CYA language in case something goes wrong.

As of right now, nobody in a position of power is holding them accountable, and sadly, I doubt anyone will.

ONLY $1.3T?

laughs in goverment-sanctioned for-profit public utility monopolies

According to the WHO, nearly 7 million people worldwide have died to date due to COVID-19. Aside from just mortality, COVID-19 has caused massive shockwaves across economic systems across the world that irreversibly impacted hundreds of millions of people. I won't pretend all of COVID deaths were caused by Trump, but you can bet your ass that a significant number of them, my personal extended family included, died because he politicized the virus and treated it like it was no big deal.

The answer is very simply advertising and affiliate revenue. If you use Chrome instead of Edge, Google gets the money from their ad engine, and Microsoft gets nothing unless you actively use Bing.

Microsoft Rewards gets you used to using Bing, which can then serve you ads on your searches instead of Google, earning money for Microsoft while giving you tiny fractions of a cent in points as a gamification strategy.

Edge has shopping features that work just like Rakuten or Capital One Shopping, where if you "earn" cash back, Microsoft gets a cut of the sale.

Honestly, it doesn't bother me much. Edge has some pretty great features added in and it actually actively saves me some money and cuts me in where Google wouldn't. Plus, it somehow is less of a memory hog and feels snappier than Chrome.

It's a great browser and is a huge upgrade from Chrome from a performance perspective if you don't value their extra features and just turn them off. Not sure how Google took Chromium and made it run like shit wit Chrome when I feel like there isn't much extra underneath the hood.

Eh. Perhaps you're right. I just know that on a personal level, I have purchased goods and services learned about through ads over time that have enhanced my life and allowed me to have meaningful experiences and create memories with the people I care about I wouldn't have otherwise had. Perhaps I'm naive, but it seems awfully silly and shortsighted looking back to have missed out in exchange for a knee-jerk angry reaction to anyone trying to sell me something.

Hmm. You only buy things you don't need because of ads? You only lose money and get nothing in return, every time? That's a shame.

They started off as a search engine with the motto “don’t be evil”. Let’s get our facts straight before you try to talk me down like I don’t know anything.

Google was selling ads about 4 years before their IPO when the "Don't Be Evil" motto was first revealed to the public. There is a "History of Google" page on Wikipedia if you want to brush up on the facts and timeline.

The fact remains that they're now an advertising company. This was their monetization model and how they've amassed 90%+ of their wealth.

You can fiddle with your security however you want. I settle for "good enough" with things that aren't Chrome, because my time isn't worth analyzing each individual cookie on a page to get the info I am looking for. Firefox and uBlock Origin are a good enough layer of protection.

Most of what Google is mentioning here is not new. They're still tracking you, and still learning about you and what you do on the Internet. They don't sell your browsing history or identity to advertisers, and as far as I'm aware, they never have; that's their golden goose. What they sell is access to a certain type of users based on what they've learned about you from your browsing history. For many, many years, users didn't have a choice. They'd be served ads for things that might be wildly irrelevant based on one errant search, or when shopping for a niche gift for a friend.

The difference now is that they're opening up topics to users. It's win-win-win: Users don't see irrelevant ads, Google doesn't serve up ads that users won't click (thus driving down the value), and advertisers pay less for useless impressions and are more likely to reach users interested in their products.

Make no mistake... Google isn't doing this out of the goodness of their hearts. It only makes their ad-based business model more efficient and valuable.

If the word "ads" makes you turn red as your blood boils like most of Lemmy, I can't help you. But if it weren't for ads, we'd still be paying for Netscape.

This isn’t any better.

What? Before, for many, many years, they didn't even ask how you would like your toppings on your shit sandwich and you happily gobbled it up. They're giving you the option to opt out of some topics, and NOW you're pissed? It may not be a privacy slam-dunk (why are you using Chrome, anyway?), but it's better than the nothing that existed before.

Of course Google doesn't care. They're not going to give you an opt-out option. They're an ad company, and their whole business is knowing your interests to get you to buy from advertisers. The search engine is just to get you in the door. The moment you press enter, they're selling you something.

I'd recommend using Edge for work. The Office integrations are impressive and make work that much more streamlined.

Wow, this comment section is a giant echo chamber. Really, guys?

Yes, Google and Chrome are dumpster fires for privacy. But this is at least inching in the right direction, however small. Now the next time you shop for a present for your girlfriend on Valentine's Day, you can prevent yourself from getting underwear ads for the next month.

Also, if this is your last straw... you've had your head in the sand for over a decade. Google has been watching every single thing you do, categorizing it, and selling ad placement for that topic to the highest bidder ever since ads became their primary business model. Chrome just made it easier to do that.

I ditched Chrome a short while ago due to its poor memory management and its inexplicable inability to handle certain sites that Edge can somehow handle fine for a third of the RAM hit. This wouldn't have been my deal breaker.

You probably weren't graded for correct citation either.

Oh yes I was. The college bookstore sold pocket style guides explicitly because of that.

What the heck, people use apps for bibliographies now? FFS, just write it yourself.

I must be getting old. Back when I was in high school and college and needed to cite stuff, I did it all freehand. No such tools existed.

Dreamliner and 737 MAX, the latest being more egregious since people died.

We did. Keep in mind that the explosion of growth on Lemmy is mostly made up of people that lost their apps due to the API rule changes, the ones that were opinionated and engaged enough to be selecting a 3rd party solution. So, Lemmy just got bombed with the loudest and most self-righteous of reddit users that now loudly circlejerk about how much better Lemmy is. In reality, all we have is a less diverse crowd of really loud people. Same shit, different platform.

Twitter was a public company before Elon's acquisition. Not sure what you're trying to get at with the "profit-driven" comment either... every business is by necessity.

Careful. Heavily promoted Libertarian and Green candidates coupled with a relatively unpalatable Democrat is how we got Trump.

Since Twitter is now private, we'll never know the real numbers, but the paper value of the Twitter brand itself being cast aside is a huge non-monetary loss.

Not to mention the bacon looks pretty fatty and the cheese is the plastic fake American cheese that refuses to melt properly instead of a proper cheddar. Yeah, this isn't food porn. This is an astonishingly mediocre burger.